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Farwerck donated his photo collection

After all these years of looking for Farwerck information there are still people who point me to new information which again leads to new information. This time I was directed towards a book on Google Books that you can’t read, but you can see snippets of it. It is a book from 1969 concerning a report of a museum director. The report says that Farwerck donated his photo collection!

The book is from 1969, so this begs the question: did he do that himself just before he died or was the transfer caused by an entry in his testament? Also, what are we talking about? A collection of photos ‘museum-worthy’?

I sent an email to the museum library and got a swift reply which is interesting for a number of reasons.

The librarian said that the report is about 1967. That is very interesting, because this is the year in which Farwerck sold his house to the neighbouring school. Earlier I have wondered what would have happened to Farwerck’s library. This donation to a museum suggests, that he has been cleaning up his house himself before (most likely) moving in with the widow of his brother. It is not unlikely that he did the same with books, which explains why so few books were auctioned in 1971. Pieces of art, archaeological objects that he obtained, everything is under the suspicion of being given away now.

There is something else that is interesting. The Farwerck collection is about 800 photos. From what the librarian could see, it are typical ‘Farwerck photos’ with symbolical details of houses and the like. His most large and posthumously published book contains 265 photos of which only 15 were made by Farwerck himself. In his most ‘image based’ book Levend Verleden (‘Living past’) from 1938, 482 images are numbered. At the end, sources for 70 of them are given. This suggests that the other 412 images are from Farwerck. Perhaps he did make a lot of photos.

It seems that Farwerck had a network of people who took photos and send those to him.

The ‘Farwerck collection’ is no longer really a collection. It has been divided over different subjects that the museum thought the photos fitting for. These parts lay scattered in different locations and in different collections. Only 40 photos have been digitalised.

I’m going to dig a little deeper. Maybe the museum has more information about the photos. Did Farwerck make some sort of catalogue before he donated the lot? In his books he is always keen to list his sources, so I would’t be surprised if he provided that sort of information to the museum. It could say something about his network.

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